﻿Vote green ﻿andy brown

Both major party leaders now hold very similar positions on the process of Brexit. They intend to gradually move the UK away from being members of the EU and they want March 2019 to be something of a non-event.The reasons for this are pretty obvious. The UK simply doesn’t have enough time to organise itself to manage a trouble free quick break from the single market. We don’t have the necessary customs systems, the trained staff, or the space for the lorries to queue to enable the UK to leave the single market in March 2019. Crashing out without those systems and leaving our businesses to deal with the consequences is now looking so damaging that neither leader is prepared to take the risk. Both leaders have decided that it is better to avoid an utter shambles and opt instead to keep to EU systems and obey all the EU rules and regulations for a couple of years after we leave whilst we sort out some of the mess. The way I look at this is that this means both major party leaderships have now accepted that slow and steady stupidity is better than rushing it. If you think differently and believe Brexit is going to be a rip roaring success then surely your focus would now be on sorting out the practicalities quickly so that it can actually happen.Instead there remains a lack of detail and of clear thinking from both sides. Where is the debate about exactly what the UK farm policy will be when we leave the EU? Where is the debate about how our regional policy will work when the European Social Fund stops? Where is the debate about how we will exercise sovereignty over the new trade deals that we are supposed to be striking?On several important issues it is possible to imagine a Brexit in which the UK has much improved policies. We could have agricultural subsidies which are carefully targeted to support smaller farms and environmentally sensitive policies. We could have investment programmes that rebalance the UK economy away from an over dependence on London and on finance and that create a powerful UK environmental industrial base in the regions. We could cut the fuel bills of our citizens and our companies by incentivising energy use reduction schemes which would help our companies compete better abroad.So you’d expect the left to be furiously working on developing the detail of such policies, testing and challenging them in debate and getting them ready to put quickly and effectively into good regulations. Instead what emerged from the Labour Party Conference was either a ghostly silence or weak untested assertions. We were for instance told that a post Brexit Labour government would be free to make UK industry great again by creating a programme of industrial subsidies.They might like to think rather carefully about how other countries will react if that is what Labour tries to do. Almost exactly at the same time as Labour was announcing this approach the United States government was imposing tariffs on Bombardier, a crucial business for Northern Ireland, because of a concern about possible hidden subsidies. How are our competitors going to react if there is an officially declared full scale programme of open subsidies? Getting out of the EU doesn’t free the UK up to subsidise its industries – it just leaves you wide open to bullying by larger trading blocks like the US or the EU we’ll have just left.It is possible to come up with a strategy to support science and industry that won’t result in a trade war if you are far sighted enough to do so intelligently. The way to do it is to subsidise reduced energy use and thus costs, to support a major programme of scientific research and to establish a supportive framework for creative industries and small business startups. But that would involve an industrial policy suitable for the 21st century. So far all I am detecting from Labour is a weak re-working of traditional factory based industrial policy from the 1970s.On the right things are even worse. You’d expect by now that Conservatives would have moved on from making silly assertions about £350 million a week for the NHS and have begun instead to start to tell us what regulations they are going to scrap and try to explain how they are going to increase UK trade when we’re outside the most attractive market for traders. Those explanations simply aren’t coming forward. Brexit was supposed to set us free to negotiate wonderful new trade deals with our glorious US partners and with other nations. No deals are progressing with any energy. Rather the reverse. The tariff war over Bombardier’s planes makes that crystal clear. Now the UK is planning to leave the EU the United States feels free to bully the UK in a trade war and that is putting jobs at threat in Northern Ireland.The other big problem for the Conservatives is that if they tell people any hard facts about what they actually want to do after Brexit then they lose voters in shedloads. Few Conservative MPs want to tell a farmer that their subsidy is going to end. Fewer still want to talk to business about how extra paperwork and regulations are going to work or the costs and uncertainties of preparing for them. None have an appetite for explaining to workers and people concerned about their local environment which of their protections they are going to remove. None want to explain how much sovereignty we lose the second we sign a new trade deal and have to place the UK under the regulation of unelected international courts of arbitration. Worst of all none want to face down Conservative Party members and tell them that most of their pet ideas about what will happen after Brexit are impossible in practice.Labour also has a problem about losing support if it spells out its policies with any clarity. The majority of Labour’s young and enthusiastic supporters think Brexit is a huge mistake. A significant minority of Labour’s voters want it to happen. Articulating what Labour will do after Brexit is therefore risky. So far we’ve have platitudes about being free to subsidise industry whilst improving workers’ rights. It isn’t easy to explain to voters how you are going to protect them better from the cold reality of international markets when you are committed to moving the UK outside one of the few world markets big enough and powerful enough to be able to sustain some degree of protection. Many young Labour supporters really favour freedom of movement. Many older ones have been persuaded that it is the cause of most of their problems. So the best strategy the party could come up with was to make sure there was no proper conference debate or vote on Brexit and to stay as silent as possible.We have two major parties who are both reluctant to work out the details of something they say must happen in case it loses then support. That is not an approach that inspires confidence.In these circumstances the Liberal Democrats ought to be picking up votes in shedloads. Instead they remain a toxic brand because the first thing they did when they entered the coalition was to betray the very voters who now ought to be flocking to their Remain banner. If someone lied to me and as a result I’ve ended up with £40,000 of debt I wouldn’t forgive them easily. That is exactly what the Lib Dems did to university students.So it isn’t easy finding a political home these days. If only there was a political party that bravely opposed the Iraq war at the time. If only someone had stood out against austerity from the first and offered a better use for the £400 billion of quantitative easing money the UK has wasted. If only someone had a forward looking vision for the British economy based on the next phase of technology. If only someone understood the scale of the environmental challenge we face and was prepared to take radical action. If only there was a party that understood how flawed the EU was but still realised it was the best option on the table. That’s what I think we need right now. So I suggest that we all get behind something along those lines. We could call it The Green Party!

Technology has provided the modern farmer with some amazing new resources. So when the pesticides known as neonicitinoids were invented we all hoped they would be a success.The idea was fantastic. Instead of having to spray chemicals on your fields you simply planted a seed that contained a pesticide that would be inside every part of the plant as it grew. This stopped problems of sprays being blown away and so both cut down on costs and helped the environment in one easy move.We now know that it is not that simple. The first real signs that there might be a problem came in France way back in 1994. Farmers growing sunflowers for their oil found that the neighbouring bee keepers experienced serious losses in their colonies. The hives themselves seemed healthy but the number of bees returning to the hive after collecting pollen was radically reduced which resulted in a lot of the colonies failing. Then problems emerged in the US. Once again large numbers of colonies collapsed.But there wasn’t a simple and direct correlation between the planting of neonicitinoid seeds and the death of bee colonies. In many localities the seeds were being used without obvious problems whereas in others bees were dying when they weren’t.So the companies producing these chemicals re-ran their tests and produced evidence that seemed to show that it was simply not possible for any bee to get a fatal dose of neonicitinoids in real life practical conditions.This has resulted in huge controversy between environmental organisations claiming evil chemical corporations are killing our pollinators and others claiming that there was a lot of fuss about nothing.The chemical companies had a point. It really is very hard to kill a bee by exposing it to levels of neonicitinoids that it might encounter collecting pollen from a variety of plants in the wild.But we environmental campaigners have looked into it in more detail and the truth is rather more complex than the chemical companies want to admit. Bees don’t collect pollen at random. They usually specialise on one particular plant and keep going back to it. Fields of rapeseed can therefore result in an individual bee getting a larger dose than might be expected as it will show a strong tendency to get its food from one prime source.Then there is the problem of how bee navigation systems work. In a high laboratory dose neonicitinoids kill bees outright. At a lower does they interfere with the bees navigation systems. It is hard enough in the wild for a bee to work out how to get home from up to two miles away, particularly when there are high winds to contend with. They rely on complex neurological systems to navigate using clues like the sun’s position. Even in the best of circumstances bees often get this wrong and return to a different hive.A heavy enough dose of neonicitinoids causes drastic reductions in the numbers of bees returning and eventually kills the colony. This is why the chemical companies are mistaken. The dose received by a foraging bee can vary enormously depending on what is happening in the environment. In one time and one place you can plant neonicitinoid seeds and no harm at all will be done to the local bee population. At another time and in another place the circumstances will be different and the crop will weaken & kill local colonies.An important recent study of actual events in the field found exactly this. Neonicitinoids really have damaged honeybees but not in every place at every time. The environmental conditions matter. This wasn’t a piece of research organised by environmental campaigners – it was paid for by the producers of neonicitinoids themselves and published in June in the journal Science.Further worrying evidence emerged in August. The journal Nature Ecology and Evolution reported that it isn’t only honeybees that are being damaged by neonicitinoids. Bumblebees and other insects are also suffering. The pesticides interfere with their reproductive ability and could even eradicate species.What is worse is that Neonicitinoids are very persistent. Any part of a living or dead plant which is blown or washed away contains the pesticides. They then concentrate in the soil at the edges of fields near hedgerows where so much of our wildlife lives. Doses much stronger than the concentration found in crops have frequently been detected in these important locations without anyone fully understanding the extent or the implications.The soil in our fields contains billions of micro-organisims in every teaspoon which are vital for soil health and crop growth. No one has yet done the research into whether any damage is being done to them by neonicitinoid run off. The consequences could be horrific and even if we stopped using these pesticides tomorrow it will take decades for them to be removed from our environment.The case is therefore proven clear and the UK government needs to put its full weight behind a complete and immediate ban.

​Credit where it is due. We finally have an outline of a Brexit transition that might actually be achievable. Not a good plan. Nor one that achieves something helpful. But at least one that could be implemented without serious immediate disruption. That’s progress.I have always believed that it is relatively easy to agree a transition deal along the lines that May is now suggesting. It simply is no longer possible to organise the necessary border posts, lorry parks, paperwork and software in time to sort out the practicalities within 18 months. There is therefore not the remotest possibility of a clean break in March 2019 without queues of vehicles, angry and frustrated businesses and an unacceptable level of chaos. There is, however, every reason to strike a deal which says nothing much happens on the day of formal departure and the UK sticks by almost all the current arrangements until the end of the current EU budget round. We carry on making promised payments and we carry on obeying the rules of freedom of movement whilst both sides get ready for a gradual move apart.The obvious critique from anyone like myself who wishes to remain is “why bother”? Surely we’d be better off shaping the rules as well as obeying them. The obvious critique from fanatical leavers is “when will we ever be free?”The answer to which is, of course, never. You can’t free yourself from reality – as most sensible people are starting to realise. If you have trade deals with the EU then you have to have a set of arrangements to police that trade and that involves agreeing to common standards and the judgements of a court that has sovereignty over all those trading. Exactly the same reality applies to any fresh trade deals we strike with the US, India, China or wherever. The only difference with the EU is that we have spent a lot of time creating some small degree of democratic control over those institutions (and a lot more time criticising the limitations and the stupidities of that control). When it comes to a trade deal with the US the policing arrangements won’t be remotely as clear and transparent as the flawed, bureaucratic but slightly democrat ones inside the EU. Instead, we’ll have rulings handed down to us by US corporate lawyers.Personally I have been very much hoping that during the long drawn out drag of leaving it will gradually become clear to almost everyone that the promise of an easy, quick and economically glorious Brexit was one of the worst lies the British public have ever been exposed to. I want a head of steam to emerge for a vote to be offered to the British people that allows us to endorse or reject the actual deal that is negotiated on Brexit rather than sticking to the result of a plebiscite on wild promises and wild threats.It is, however, important not to confuse wishes with likely outcomes. May’s speech recognising the realities changes the dynamics. We are no longer in for a quick and dramatic cock up. We are in for a long drawn out gradual cock up. The plan now is that there never will be a day when we leave the EU. Instead we will move away steadily hoping no one will really notice. That way we might get to keep London as a major financial centre for some time, we may be able to retain rather more of the vital foreign doctors and nurses working in the NHS and we’ll lose fewer multinational manufacturing businesses. We may even get to retain most of the rights at work and environmental protections for a bit longer. May is going for a boring and non-spectacular Brexit. One that matches her personality.It is also one that might just be able to unite enough of her party to let her lurch on. There is a very voluble faction inside her party that wants an all out exit straight away and still thinks it can somehow magically be organised in time to transform everything overnight in March 2019. They have the advantage of a very simple argument – “out should mean out” and they have a lot of media support. But they have the very simple disadvantage that what they want to do can’t be made to happen in time. There also aren’t actually enough Conservative MPs behind them and with UKIP having completely shot its bolt May might just be able to get away with standing up to them. Most Conservative MPs voted to remain because that was best for business. In any vote on hard versus soft Brexit May can command enough of their votes and enough support from other parties to crush anyone on her far right who rebels.So I now think the future will pan out a little like this.

May will stay on and consolidate her leadership within the Conservative Party

Most people will become very bored by a gradual transition away from the EU and will put up with leaving

The Conservatives will seek to restore their reputation by trying to pull off the quietest possible Brexit. Whether they succeed will mainly depend on how far and how quickly the economy slows now that quantitative easing is over

Public frustration is likely to be expressed in by-elections and in the May 2018 local elections with the Conservatives losing a lot of seats

Labour will force through many Brexit amendments but will have too many of its own rebels to ever bring the government down on a vote

If Labour does force an election and win it then the Brexit policy will scarcely change and they too will try for a quiet exit.

I therefore think that it is now virtually inevitable that Brexit will take place. In four years’ time when the real changes start to happen the majority of living voters will have voted against it and a clear majority of the new voters will also be opposed. But we are going to have two major parties both determined to see it through via a gradual process.Incredibly we will go into the next General Election with over 50% of voters opposed to Brexit but two major parties both offering to lead us through a steady as she goes exit. I have always been cynical about the merits of two party politics. We saw it at its worst when both parties backed the Iraq war. Now we are about to see it once again at its very worst.Get ready for some impressive bluster from Labour over the difference between their Brexit and May’s but get even more ready for a serious coming together of their positions and a consensus. Unfortunately it is an agreement to make a huge mistake slowly and at leisure rather than go at it quickly. What could possibly go wrong?

I went over to the Lancashire fracking demo today. There were no shortage of good reasons to go. For most people the key problems are associated with concerns over the techniques being used. After all most of the headlines focus on worries like earthquakes or pollution of drinking water.Personally my prime concern isn’t that if we frack Preston New Road that we’ll get a sizeable earthquake locally. A lot of Lancashire has lived with minor earth tremors from mine subsidence for decades and I tend to accept the argument that the nuisance from that will be limited.There are however problems with the water management process which are almost certain to have a major impact. Fracking requires pumping large quantities of water underground, mixing it with some very unpleasant chemicals and then creating enough water pressure to fracture rocks deep underground. The first problem is getting hold of the quantities of water needed without depleting local rivers or increasing risks of shortages during droughts. The second is that no one can possibly control what happens to the pressurised water deep underground. In a complex geology it is simply scientifically impossible to know where the polluted water will go. It therefore doesn’t strike me as a very responsible form of technology. Worse still is that fact that a lot of the polluted water comes back up to the surface. It then has to be stored and then of. That means tankers of water travelling to water processing plants. We don’t currently have enough plants with the capacity to do the necessary processing. So either the polluted water will get dumped in the sea or the taxpayer will end up paying for new processing sites. Whilst the local residents will have to put up with endless movements of tankers and the local ratepayers will have to pay to fix the roads that they damage.Then there is the problem of the need to burn off excess gas at the well heads. The fracking companies are very fond of paying for lovely looking web sites explaining how technically skilled and scientifically sophisticated their work is. The reality is that they cannot possibly avoid burning off much of the gas that emerges at unpredictable pressures particularly in the early stage of the process. So the locals have to put up with burnt gas fumes mixed with added chemicals. Not my idea of a clean and safe technology.Yet if I am honest none of that would have got me motivated to turn out on an unpromising Monday to protest about a drilling operation. My real concern is the simple fact that we know the environment cannot take the burning of all the conventional fossil fuel reserves that have been identified. CO2 levels are now above 400 ppm all year worldwide and rising fast. That is scientific fact. How that impacts on climate none of us know for certain. We are running a giant experiment on the planet and 97% of the scientists who have looked at the evidence inform us that the experiment is going badly wrong and has to be stopped quickly. Burning one more source of fossil fuels in the hope that it will shore up the UK’s dreadful balance of payments and its governments shortage of tax revenues is therefore extraordinarily short sighted.What is even more astonishing is the way that investing in this kind of technology is neither necessary nor economically wise. Technology is moving on. Over the next few decades it is now almost certain that the world’s economies will move away from fuelling their civilisations by burning irreplaceable geological deposits and start to do so by increasingly effective solar, wind and water power. We are also highly likely to see switches to much more energy efficient devices, better storage and improved controls over timing of use.In these circumstances any nation which puts its investment and its research efforts into finding new sources of fossil fuels is following a technological dead end. No country ever prospered by investing in declining technology. The UK should be getting at the front of the next economic revolution and investing in the next generation of green energy technology.Going all out for fracking means that the UK government is not just inconveniencing local people, it is damaging the planet at the same time as failing to prepare our economy for a major technological change. Which would be bad enough if the mistake it was making had popular support. It doesn’t.The national government has tried to bribe local communities to accept fracking with promises of investment in community halls and local facilities. It hasn’t worked. Lancashire’s elected councillors voted against fracking taking place in their county. So the national government that talks so much about the importance of respecting sovereignty gave up bribery and went for bullying. It simply passed a law that over ruled normal local government powers and forced councils across the country to approve fracking or risk massive legal and financial sanctions.This is what really made me annoyed. It is bad enough that our UK government ignorantly buys the weak and flawed arguments of the gas industry and encourages them to suck every last drop of energy out of the ground instead of investing in modern technology. What is worse is that they are taking upon themselves excessive powers to over-rule local communities and impose fracking on them regardless of choice.I have always found that people are at their most aggressive and narrow minded when they know in their heart that something they are doing is wrong but it is in their short term financial interests. I am therefore expecting the UK government to get more and more insistent and aggressive about forcing fracking down our throats. Whilst forward thinking governments like China invest billions in switching their economies away from fossils as rapidly as they can. Let us hope that a few of us can make it that bit harder for our government to get us locked into the past whilst others embrace the future. All power to the elbow of the couple of hundred protestors who turned up today.

​There is a tiny parasite that infects dogs and cats and can change their behaviour. Apparently it makes them more vulnerable to predators because they become more reckless and unware of the threats surrounding them. The result is they are more likely to be killed by dangerous animals and then get eaten – with the result that the parasite then spreads to a nice new host.It has long been known that this parasite can be picked up by humans from their pets and this week it was revealed that there is new evidence about how extensively it can also change human behaviour.This got me thinking. Has Theresa May been infected? Is this the explanation for the sudden death wish she acquired during the election campaign? She certainly seems blissfully unaware of the threats surrounding her and her party.Most Conservative leaders would worry if they were 18 months away from losing their country’s biggest trade deal and had no clear contingency plans for a hard Brexit or even a vague idea about how they are going to implement the customs checks at our borders and manage the queues of lorries. May sails blissfully on assuring us all that the negotiations are going really well.Most Conservative leaders would worry about losing the support of police and prison warders and the potential of a chaotic winter in the NHS. Not Theresa. She just announces that she is not only going to cut pay by 1.9% in real terms for the lucky ones but she is going to take the cost of the nominal increase out of running their service. So they get a pay cut and increased pressure of work. For the eight year running. May sails blissfully on assuring them that if public sector staff do the figures her way they will realise that their pay cuts really have been rises. Not a great way to win the respect of doctors who know the reality that if you started out as a doctor ten years ago you had no student debt, a final salary pension scheme, a higher salary and massively less pressure at work. Most Conservative leaders would worry if they were being circled by rivals running campaigns to replace her and building up factions within the party with the sole aim of taking it even further toward the loony right. Johnson has taken to publishing articles on Brexit policy without bothering to clear them with the PM. Rees Mogg smugly assures us every week that he is not really running a leadership campaign. May sails blissfully on ignoring the obvious threat that an ideologically driven far right will capture her party and destroy it at the polls.Most Conservative leaders would worry if they had just gone down badly in an election campaign because they were remote, aloof and trying to build up a cult of personality when they hadn’t got much of one. May sails blissfully on. Indeed she thinks her rejection at the polls gives her the right to engage in the biggest power grab any Prime Minister has got away with since the Second World War. She can now alter any ex EU law without bothering to go back to Parliament and get approval.Every week that goes by we get further evidence of how isolated she is from her own party and she becomes more and more isolated from the reality of the lives her subjects are actually living. When she gave her acceptance speech I wrote that it is always wise to assume that newly elected leaders will do pretty much the opposite of whatever they say on the steps of number 10. After all Margaret Thatcher had promised us to bring harmony and Tony Blair was going to specialise in ethical foreign policy.Rarely has a prediction proved more accurate. May had the cheek to tell us she was going to look after the “just about managing”. Instead she has utterly neglected their needs. Real wages are down again and haven’t moved up since the day the Conservatives were elected. Zero hours contracts and enforced self-employment continue to proliferate. Steel workers have their pensions stolen with government support. Young people are being charged over 6% to borrow money on their £40,000 of student debt whilst banks offer 1% to savers. And the residents of Grenfell Tower are still in B&Bs whilst a judge they don’t trust leads an enquiry without teeth.The country is utterly fed up with ten years of austerity created by a private sector banking problem and in no mood to put up with another round. Yet Osborne left May and Hammond to cope with plans for the worst of austerity to strike in the next couple of years so new cuts have to be made. Worse still the Bank of England has begun to pull the plug on its gigantic efforts to counteract government cuts and keep the economy moving. So May also faces an economic slowdown.The Prime Minister is heading for the perfect storm. A worsening economy. Domestic unpopularity. A split party with weak personal support. A difficult and complex set of controversial negotiations to conduct. And a public that is no longer prepared to be cowed by calls for yet more austerity.Her only tactic is to smile and tell us that she is tough enough to see us through all this because she really is strong and stable. What could possibly go wrong? Who could possibly doubt her?Except perhaps those of us who don’t share her political death wish.

When your employer offers you a pay cut most of us know that it is bad news. That is what May has just done to her employees. The UK government will be cutting the pay of every group of public servants. Again. 8 years running.The good news for prison warders is that they have been identified as a priority group. So they have been promised special treatment. They will only get a pay cut of 1.2% in real terms. Their pay packets will rise by 1.7%. Inflation is however running at 2.9% thanks to Brexit. Theresa thinks those numbers are going to deal with a recruitment crisis and a drop in morale amongst a workforce.Good luck with that. Asking people to lock up the poor in overcrowded and dangerous conditions and then move them about 9 or 10 times during a short sentence doesn’t create job satisfaction. Nor does it help if you have to watch inmates acquire horrible drug addictions that will make crime outside worse. Or if your more experienced colleagues have left the service in disgust and you are left to fight near impossible problems with an inexperienced team. In these circumstances offering staff another year of reduced living standards is not entirely likely to produce mass satisfaction and the end of a serious recruitment crisis.The police have been treated a little bit better. Or lied to a little bit more carefully. They get a pay rise of 2%. Which means a real cut of 0.9%. But one per cent of the pay rise isn’t consolidated. It is simply a one off bonus. So actually their core pay is cut by 1.9%. Worse still is where the money comes from. The entire cost of the extra increase is coming from existing budgets. Put simply May has just announced a 1% cut in police budgets and is trying to put the blame on police staff for daring to request that their pay stands still after almost a decade of reductions.This is the best that anyone in the public sector can now expect to happen to their pay. The government will announce that it has given you a smaller than usual pay cut. But it has not paid for it. So your managers have to take the money away from frontline services or find efficiency savings.It is never a bad idea to run things more efficiently and the way services operate can always be improved. But that is not what most “efficiency” savings are. They are simply reductions in budgets that are taking place at a time of rising demand.The NHS is facing a huge problem of an increasingly elderly population and increasingly sophisticated technology becoming available. That ought to be good news but it creates obvious pressures on costs. To give an example. Like many men of my age I have prostate cancer. That sounds a lot more dramatic than it is. The standard treatment is to do nothing because there is a very high chance it will never develop into a problem. But if you don’t monitor it and you only find out it has started to become problematic when the condition has become painful there is a good chance you’ll die of it.So the NHS has spent a lot of money monitoring my heath with blood tests, MRI scans and biopsies and my very nice immigrant doctor has come to the conclusion that some very clever targeted treatment will inconvenience me for a few months but keep me alive.Some people argue that this kind of additional cost for helpful early monitoring and treatment is really a saving because it avoids more expensive treatment later on. That is nonsense. Everyone dies of something and when I get over this problem I am very much hoping that I will be around to be a drag on health service expenditure for a rather long time. That will be great for me but not for NHS expenditure.All those extra monitoring and additional operations for people like me mean costs are bound to go up not down - regardless of how clever the health service managers are. No one wants efficiency savings to mean that their relative can’t have the latest treatment. Yet NHS managers are being left to face a horrible challenge. They have budgeted to give their staff a real term cut in pay of 1.9%. Not surprisingly valuable staff are leaving and being poached – sometimes by private services that sell the very same staff back to the NHS at inflated prices to cover the gap caused by their departure. If government offers those staff a rare year in which their pay stays static then there will be a 1.9% shortfall in NHS income across the board. At a time of rising costs.It is simply not possible to cut NHS back office costs 8 years in a row and achieve all your savings from increased efficiency when core costs are rising along with patient needs. Real terms cuts in the budget per operation have been a reality throughout this period. It is useful and necessary services that are under threat not consultants’ bills for work on the latest top down re-organisation.Theresa May must know this. She can do the maths. Or at least we all better hope that she can. We must therefore assume that she is making conscious choices. A brave honest Prime Minister would tell us all that we have to pay rather more in taxation in order to fund the NHS and other public services. A cowardly and incompetent one would fail to balance the budget and try and cover up the failure by asking public sector workers to take another pay cut and managers to take the blame for service failures.In case anyone worries that any display of budgetary bravery would create an excessive burden of taxation for rich individuals I suggest they study the trading figures for Amazon and the tax bill that they paid. Corner shops are paying a higher proportion of their income in tax than some large corporations.There is a very simple way to deal with out of control tax dodging that is destroying our public services. Let a jury decide whether the tax paid by a company is excessively out of line with its sales in the UK and impose punishing fines on offenders.Honesty over the need for more taxes and determination to fight off tricky tax lawyers is the only sustainable way to provide properly funded public services. All that is required is the government to have the will to act. Don’t hold your breath.

​I have lost count of the number of people who have proved brave and fierce campaigners for human rights. Provided that they are rights for people just like them. I now make it a rule of thumb that I will never fully trust a person until they have a track record of defending the rights of those who are different to them.So I suppose I shouldn’t have been shocked by Aung San Suu Kyi turning on a minority group within Burma and not just staying silent about ethnic cleansing but actively justifying it. She has a proud track record of years in prison and house arrest defending the rights of the people of Myanmar. She now has a shameful track record of months of justifying state oppression of an entire group of those very same citizens.It is of course possible that she sincerely believes one section of her people are setting fire to their own homes en masse. It is also possible that she thinks they are running away from helicopter gunships unnecessarily. Or that half a million people are crossing a border into Bangladesh because they feel like a bit of tourism in a refugee camp.I don’t, however, think that she is a naïve or a foolish person. I think she has taken a conscious decision that these aren’t really her people. She is quite prepared to attack her fellow countrywomen and men – provided that they don’t share her religious beliefs. Those generals may be nasty people but they are her nasty people now.You can hear the same double standards from people who fiercely and rightly defend the rights of the state of Israel to exist in peace and freedom but who will strongly deny the same rights for the people of Palestine. Instead they happily cheer on “their” army whilst it inflicts punishment on an entire people regardless of individual guilt. Then again I’ve heard people strongly defending the rights of religious minorities – provided they are Muslims. The same person will sometimes happily ignore it if someone stones to death a Christian or a Jew.The source of this kind of double standards is very deep rooted. Go back far enough in time and it is clear that humanity lived in small tribes struggling to survive in a hostile environment. We know from early archaeology that early humans cared for those who had been injured because they have found bones that have healed and know that this means the community must have looked after them for months without getting much back. So there must have been quite a number of kind and nurturing people around from the first.Unfortunately there is equally strong evidence that early humans engaged in warfare and that cannibalism was quite common. Which more than likely means that there is a very long track record of humans being kind to those inside their own group and pretty unpleasant to those outside.We are, as a species, capable of both kindness and cruelty. Quite often it comes from the same individual. Which is why we need to take real care not to outgroup people and define them as less than human. It is also why it is important to move beyond our genetic inheritance of tribalism and campaign for the rights of all - not just those who look or sound like us.I am no passivist because I have met out and out racists who would kill without conscience. There are occasions when the only way to stop one tribal leader from imposing their will on the rest of us is to stand up and fight. There are also occasions when we need a bit of understanding of the level of risk we take in a nuclear world if we remain tribal. Humanity is capable of great narrow mindedness and tunnel vision. It is not capable of surviving nuclear war. Which is why we need to take extreme care before we do decide that nothing can be done to reconcile differences and it is necessary to go to war.I would sleep a lot easier in my bed if I thought Donald Trump and Kim Il Sung understood that and the British government hadn’t decided to cheer on Trump! The time has come to take both these untrustworthy individuals at their word and face up to the level of risk they represent. Then we need the US, Russia and China talking seriously about how each of the leaders of their tribes can get enough of what they want without putting the rest of us at risk via a nuclear standoff.

I may not like many Conservative policies but there were some things that used to impress me about their party. It had a reputation for ruthless efficiency over leadership. Now they’ve managed to dump both those characteristics in short order. They aren’t ruthless with their leader and they aren’t efficient in their efforts to find a replacement.Let’s start with their Prime Minister. Rarely has any politician managed to finish off their honeymoon period quite so quickly and completely. She had an easy ride into power because her opponents were busy fighting each other. We then had weeks of the press telling us what a strong and stable leader she was and how much we could depend on her ability to pull the whole nation together and steer us through Brexit. That all sounded quite convincing to a lot of people and it won her a landslide at the local elections in May. So much so that she made the fundamental mistake of believing her own propaganda.Going to the country as “Strong and stable” and demanding a huge majority is a pretty good tactic. Provided of course that you aren’t weak and unreliable. One week she supported Brexit. The next she wanted national unity behind hard Brexit. One week she backed Hammond’s budget decision to put VAT on the self-employed. The next week she didn’t. One week she was going to take away homes owned by elderly people who needed care. The next week she wasn’t.Indeed she proved so weak and unreliable that no one could quite tell what her policies were because she kept changing her mind about things she’d announced in her manifesto a couple of days earlier. And that was all without the small problem that she was a Prime Minister who felt awkward and uncomfortable debating ideas with opponents or meeting ordinary people. Things which are normally quite important for the job.Yet despite all these failings the Conservatives daren’t get rid of her. Because they would then have to tear themselves apart trying to agree on a replacement. This would be hard enough for them if the difficulty was just getting a consensus between two parts of a political party which don’t share a vision of the future. They have the added difficulty of a remarkable lack of available talent.May got to be leader by saying as little as possible. That way she could look stately and avoid entering into squalid arguments or saying anything stupid. Boris Johnson proved quite willing to do that job. He shoots his mouth off with remarkable regularity and little forethought. For a long time he got away with fooling a lot of people that he was covering up his massive brainpower behind the disguise of a bumbling amateur. Being expensively educated and possessing a good knowledge of Latin can do that for you. Then he started telling us that he had a secret scheme to have cake and eat it. Before long he was cutting such a figure of grotesque incompetence that it was clear even to his strongest supporters that it wouldn’t be a good idea to put someone so utterly unreliable in charge of the country. Rarely has any politician displayed such a steely determination to demonstrate that being highly educated and possessing wisdom and intelligence are not the same thing.By contrast Michael Gove has demonstrated that he is too clever for his own good and certainly to get the support of his party. Dumping Johnson so that he could stand for PM himself was the perfect way to ensure that he can never be PM. Everyone could now see that he couldn’t be trusted any further than he could be thrown. That isn’t the most endearing of characteristics to put before the electorate. It would be nice to think that a spell out of power in which he got a long hard look at the end of his career taught him a lesson and he has come back as a convinced champion of Green business ideas. I fear that he has instead simply decided that he needs to rebuild some semblance of a reputation for honesty and is hoping that saying nice things about the environment whilst spending precious little money on it will prove good enough to do the job. It is unlikely to work and the party can’t put forward as a potential Prime Minister someone who is best known for betrayal.The list of the other ones they can’t is a long one. Cameron is finished. Osborne is finished. Hammond isn’t trusted by the right of the party. Nicky Morgan got dumped by May for daring to be competent and independent minded. And then there’s a long tail of second raters who don’t have enough name recognition to get above Pointless if contestants on the famous quiz show were asked to trawl their memories for UK politicians.All of which is leading the Conservatives to the ultimate act of desperation. More than half of their members now think that their best future leader is Rees Mogg.When I first read this in the Daily Telegraph I could scarcely believe that it was true. Now it has been taken up by the BBC and is being repeated with great regularity. Almost as if someone was trying to build a head of steam behind his candidacy.The idea would be comic if it wasn’t so tragic. A party that once prided itself on leading “One Nation” is seriously considering the possibility of being led by a man with 6 kids who has never changed a nappy. This is not the best way to endear yourself to a high proportion of female voters. I doubt whether they will be brought onside by his smug assurance that this was OK because he employed a nanny to do it. That statement comes from a man who tells us regularly about the faults of the nanny state. Faced with the choice between a nanny rich Prime Minister and a Labour leader launching a full on attack on privilege it is possible that people will touch their forelocks and bend their knee in respect and vote for a genuine reactionary who opposes abortion and gay rights. It is also possible that electors will slaughter Rees Mogg at the polls and the Conservatives will finish themselves off for decades if they choose to be led by him. So the mess of a leadership vacuum looks likely to continue. May lurches on. Backed by no one. But no one to replace her. Unless that is you take seriously the chances of the man who is leading us through these difficult Brexit negotiations.David Davis does his best to convince himself that he sounds like a figure responsible business people could trust. If he could actually achieve that it would go down well with the Conservative Party and also with a large number of unaligned voters. There are just one or two small problems. Firstly Davis has to lead us through Brexit without too many problems before he becomes plausible. Just at the moment it rather looks like he is swanning off and leaving his office juniors in charge a little too often. Before coming back and making rude remarks about the people he’s trying to negotiate with. Oh, and of course, putting forward ideas for how it is all going to work which are weak, woolly and show no signs of offering a clear route to a sensible compromise.Nevertheless our brave leader of the Brexit negotiations is, incredibly, the most plausible candidate that the Conservatives have got to replace May. He may be bland and boring but compared to the rest those characteristics are starting to look pretty attractive. If he is a touch lazy and uninterested in bothering with details then that may be a small price for the Party to pay for him not being completely toxic. After all David Cameron got away with those faults and was Party Leader for close on ten years.And no one could possibly think his leadership ended badly. Could they???!!!!!

The UK economy is entering a new and particularly difficult phase. For the past ten years the dominant event has been the 2007-8 financial crash and the desperate attempts to recover from that. Austerity politics have been the reality for most people. Meanwhile the economy has been driven hard forward via providing quantitative easing money for profligate bankers and negative real interest rates for savers.We have seen the rare combination of a central bank furiously creating free money and exceptionally low inflation. Yet despite ten years of a growing economy accompanied by heavy cuts in government spending the UK government is still running a massive deficit on its income and expenditure and the UK is running an even more worrying deficit on what it buys and sells from abroad.Now we have reached the stage where the main action that has fuelled growth in the economy can’t continue. Inflation in the UK is no longer close to zero. It stands at 2.6%. Not something that most people would worry about. But something that makes a very big difference to policy.You can’t just print free money when inflation exists and is tending to rise. You can only do that during the very rare circumstances of an economy with a tendency towards contraction and no significant inflation. Those times have gone.Labour is now in short supply. Even without the heavy drag effect of unequal employment legislation and exceptionally weak protection of workers’ rights it is now going to be very difficult to stop people from asking for and getting pay rises.This can be seen in the public sector where the government is finally showing signs of figuring out that if you keep wage rises well below inflation for ten years then you start to find people leave their jobs and go and work somewhere that pays better. Faced with a crisis of losing too many experienced police officers, prison wardens, teachers, nurses and doctors the Conservatives have been reported to have finally decided to drop their 1% wage cap on public sector workers.In the private sector some of the pay pressures are also strengthening by the day. The building industry doesn’t know where it is going to get much of its workforce from in 18 months because it is clear that any Brexit this government arranges won’t involve freedom of movement. The agricultural industry is in the same situation. As are a lot of knowledge economy companies that need scientists or computer programmers who they won’t be able to get from abroad. You can’t simply train up that kind of workforce in a few weeks. The companies are therefore going to have to bid against each other and against the public sector to attract workers by paying higher wages. Those wages are highly likely to result in price increases and further pay demands. Especially if the pound continues to decline and food prices rise.Put together wage and price rises and you get inflation. It would be a brave central banker who would ignore the threat. That means that the central fuel which has kept the economy moving - £400 billion of quantitative easing plus negative interest rates – is highly likely to stop.Right through all the worst of ten years of austerity the Bank of England has managed to keep the UK economy expanding quite rapidly via QE. Indeed we have had the strange sight of central government putting the breaks on via massive austerity whilst the central bankers created easy money. If they can no longer do that then the economy is highly likely to slow up. Not driven by a well thought out decision to plan for a low growth reduced consumption economy. Driven by chaotic failure to manage events.The central bank isn’t going to be able to control the damage created by austerity politics. Nor is it in a position to deal with it if anything goes wrong with the credit bubble that has developed and the frightening level of personal debt that exists in the UK. It has used up all the tools in its bag and the problems still remain. The average household has unsecured debts of over £13,000. That doesn’t sound to me like an economy that it based on safe ground. It sounds like a repeat of uncontrolled lending to people who can’t afford to pay because many of them are on zero hours contracts and lurching from one pay day loan to the next.We are therefore entering a period of extraordinary vulnerability. The economy is slowing – but the central bank has almost run out of ways of counteracting this. The government is weak and divided – yet it is facing Brexit, the biggest intellectual challenge any government has faced in decades. The public is increasingly fed up after a decade of austerity – yet the budget isn’t anywhere near to being balanced. Bad loans from banks took us to brink of collapse – yet many households have debts levels that they may never be able to pay.Add that to a massive divergence between the economic experience of young people and the elderly and we have real problems. It is never wise to predict economic events as they are so complex and so much interacts. But one thing does look pretty safe to predict.If any of this analysis is even remotely right then we are in for a hard time of it.If all we had to worry about was the political consequences of change then all of this might provide some grounds for optimism. A government that has prided itself on claiming to provide us with a strong and stable economy trying to lead us through Brexit during a period of serious economic instability is going to become even more unpopular if the economy worsens and will struggle to survive. The Conservative Party has never been more vulnerable to splitting apart and gaining a reputation with young voters that it may never shake off.Unfortunately we also have to deal with the economic consequences of failure. Living through times of economic difficulty is never a pleasant experience. After ten years of austerity most people were looking forward to bit of breathing space and some signs of serious recovery.We are unlikely to get that until we kick out this crowd of incompetents and move beyond a reactionary approach to change and start the long hard job of proactive long term planning for a more positive and sustainable future.

​The storms in Texas and in Bangladesh aren’t the product of human action. They are caused by the impact of sunlight on oceans. Any environmental activist that denied that obvious truth would be ignoring scientific fact. I am not aware of a single one of us who would argue anything quite so foolish.To use that reality to argue that human action has not had any impact on either the strength or the frequency of storms is every bit as foolish. If you put more energy into a system then it has to go somewhere. When we increase the level of C02 in the atmosphere we can predict with absolute certainty that there must be an impact on climate. The level of CO2 in July 2017 was 407.25 parts per million. In July 2016 it was 404.5. The steady and relentless increase is down to only one single cause – human action. CO2 increases the retention of heat in the atmosphere as a matter of simple scientific fact. Arguing that this has no impact on the climate or that it can’t make storms worse is like arguing that when you turn on a kettle the water won’t start to boil.It has been fascinating this week to watch the stubborn determination of climate change deniers to ignore the evidence of their own eyes. The US has now lost great chunks of two of its biggest cities to tropical storms in only 12 years. Yet we are still being told that this is just bad luck, a weather event that we can do nothing about and stuff like this happens every 100 years or so regardless of what we do so we don’t need to make any effort to remove the one part of the cause that we are in control of.Incredibly most of the press has even praised Trump for arriving in Texas early, making sympathetic noises and promising some of his own money. If they have had criticism it has mostly been of the height of his wife’s shoes. The sheer hypocrisy of arriving at a hurricane disaster scene a few weeks after cancelling every single one of the US’s efforts to limit the human impact on storms that he could find is what should have sparked a storm of criticism.Equally astonishing some of the victims seem to remain firm supporters of Donald Trump’s climate denial. Indeed we’ve been seeing on our television screens pictures of people who have lost everything but are bravely informing us that this is all part of God’s will and somehow he will provide. He won’t. The government might. Provided that the money comes from a budget that Donald Trump hasn’t cut yet. Or that the work of government agencies isn’t shut down by him for too long in an attempt to force through his wall.Never underestimate the power of wishful thinking in a reactionary. When a change in the way that we do things becomes technologically necessary many people embrace that change and try and shape it or benefit from it. Others simply get more aggressively defensive of their old ways and convince themselves that the need for change will go away if they shout loudly enough against it. There were plenty of people in the nineteenth century who tried to stop the spread of railways by banning them from coming to their town or village. The result was not that railways went away. It was that their town became a backwater that missed out. The same will happen as we leave the fossil fuel era behind us – with the added twist that a powerful minority is still making a lot of money out of sticking to the old ways.The need to act and to act collectively to try to limit the damage of climate change is evident to every scientist who hasn’t been bought and paid for. It is now not only being accepted as a given but being actively acted upon by almost every government around the world. None of the evidence is going to have any impact on Donald Trump or his strongest supporters. They will simply get more angry and more bigoted in defence of the old ways of doing things.However, reality does have a strong tendency to convince those who keep open minds. We can all see the human cost of what has happened in Bangladesh and in Texas. We can all understand the suffering. Every time such events happen more people ask themselves the obvious simple questions: “Is this really normal?” “Have our actions contributed anything to making this happen?” “Are we really going to sit back and watch whilst things like this happen more and more frequently?”Events themselves are persuading more and more people that something is changing to climate that goes well beyond a bit of occasional bad luck with the weather. Let us hope that enough people see right through the likes of Trump thoroughly enough to finish off the last gasp of the reaction against change.Unlike some people I don’t want to see Trump impeached. I certainly don’t want him assassinated. I fear that will only create a myth that his policies could have worked if it weren’t for an establishment conspiracy. Instead, I would like to see him carry on heading down the approval ratings to the point where it becomes absolutely crystal clear to almost everyone in America and in the world that his politics have failed them. I then want him voted out comprehensively to be replaced by someone who will push forward actions to limit the damage of climate change every bit as energetically as he is pushing them backwards. We need his reactionary politics to be completely exposed and finished off not some quick and clever manoeuvre that leaves any room for doubt about the huge flaws in his thinking.Before too many more people have their lives wrecked.